As for Walter, his hesitancy comes from his own experience with a father figure that let him down, Agent Cabe Gallo. In flashbacks, we see how young Walter and Gallo form a friendship after Walter’s innocent hack of NASA gets him into trouble. The flashbacks were fairly pointless, and really didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know about the Walter/Cabe dynamic. Also, the show does Robert Patrick no service by taking him back to the early 90s because thanks to Terminator 2: Judgment Day we know exactly what Patrick looked like back then, and the bad wig looks like one of Corey Stoll’s hand-me-downs for The Strain.
But there was a good energy with the case of the week, although I definitely noted that the writers seem to be hitting the technobabble hard and fast so that we don’t stop and question the possibility, or plausibility, of the nerd herd’s activities. Again this week, I noticed that occasions where Walter and the others left without supervision as they try to move the case forward on their own is when the show’s mix of comedy and action comes together in a perfect mixture. It happened on two occasions in “Father’s Day” and was fairly effective given that the bad guys were Russian gangsters, and as TV cop dramas have made us very aware, Russian gangsters are the worst kind of organized criminal. Fortunately, for our heroes, they’re also not very smart.
On their own, the Scorpion gang nearly gets killed twice. It seems weird, but it’s almost as if the writers have realized that leaning on the tension in these kinds of scenes doesn’t work for the series nearly as well as leaning on the humor of the juxtaposition of the brainy kids being forced into situations where they have to get at least somewhat physical. It would be quite the shocking twist at this point if one of these occasions ended up with Sylvester, or Happy for example, eating lead, but I don’t think the Scorpion writers are that cruel. So instead, we can enjoy Toby doing his bizarre interpretation of an FBI agent, because the Russians, being raised on American action movies from the 80s, buy completely into the idea of the “crazy unpredictable cop with a suicidal streak.”
As the week wraps, we see Paige decided to let Ralph meet his dad after some unexpected input from Happy on the subject. We don’t yet know what comes from the meeting between Drew and his son, but obviously Drew won’t be around long because we know who Ralph’s “real” dad is, and it’s not the former almost professional athlete. Of course, Drew isn’t very developed either, and all we know right now is that he might not be a dog person. Although Team Scorpion got a hard lesson in not all geniuses are trustworthy, Walter knows that the real enemy is the normals, and some normals are now more suspicious than others.